DESCRIPTION (from the application): This is an application for a new postdoctoral training program in critical care research. This application describes a project-oriented approach to training. This approach embraces a distributed model of research which encourages the trainee to use several established laboratories as resources which are brought to develop mechanistic solutions to questions which emerge from his/her project(s). This decentralized model of research and approach to training promotes diversity in at least two ways. First, trainees will master a broad spectrum of experimental strategies that will form the basis for their later transition to project leaders. Second, although trainees will be trained, counseled and evaluated by a personal mentor and by core faculty of established investigators representing excellence in clinical research and basic science, trainees will be able to approach any member of the Washington University faculty whose interests converge with the trainee's interests to focus upon a research problem in critical care to serve as a research project mentor. This latter strategy will allow the training institution to focus upon interdisciplinary challenges facing critical care investigators and encourage other members of the university community, trainees and established investigators alike, to lend their expertise to the solution of diverse problems in the biology of critical illness.